This film received bad reviews from some film “experts” for coming across a little bit cheesy, sentimental and unrealistic, presenting a romantic love where adolescent feelings pervade everything. Nonetheless, even though it’s true that the movie takes place in a typical adolescent context, the form in which the love between the two main characters develops is the complete opposite of other adolescent movies (for ex.., GREASE).

In this case, the love that they display is a creative love, which builds the person up, makes him go out of himself; it is a love that creates bonds of mutual trust. Of course there is no need for an intimate sexual relationship during the stage of courtship in order to strengthen the relationship between the couple.

Landon’s attitude at the beginning manifests clear selfishness and extreme superficiality:

• Jamie to Landon: “You don’t care about classes or graduating but you like school because
  you’re popular and you’ll never be on top again. Your act only works on an audience.”
• Landon to Jamie: “You don’t care what people think about you?”

From a superficial point of view, Landon is the successful one while Jamie is the school outcast, but on a deeper level Jamie maintains her internal freedom, feeling completely sure of what she does, while Landon, when he begins to dig within himself, discovers the fragility of his lifestyle.

The relationship between Landon and Jamie goes through the different phases of love between a man and a woman. First is the stage of “falling in love,” the sentimental attraction of one person toward another, which is independent of the will.
Landon feels attracted to Jamie not on account of her external values (friendships, beauty…), but rather because of something that not even he understands. This attraction is irrational, since it clashes head-on with Landon’s lifestyle up to that moment. The logical or “reasonable” thing that would be been coherent with his life would have been to feel attracted to a superficial girl, not to a girl with the depth of values that Jamie has.

At the beginning, Landon tries to get close to her while preserving the schema of values of his trivial world (min. 30, scene where Landon tells her that he wants to be friends without anyone knowing). This schema quickly falls apart and Landon moves to the next phase of falling in love, where he disregards his selfishness and everyone from his world in order to singularly seek the good of the person that he loves.

This is not seen only in his general attitude toward Jamie’s needs, but also in how he manages his sexual desire. If you are attracted to someone, you begin the process of falling in love in which it is normal for sexual desire to be awakened in moments of greater intimacy. Landon is able to radically change his behavior in this situation, which will lead him to have a more intimate relationship, integrating this impulse into a loftier design of caring and respecting the person, not seeing her as a mere object of pleasure.

When Jamie tells Landon about her incurable illness, instead of behaving like he would have before meeting Jamie (rejection, distancing, etc.), he devotes himself even more to her, trying to fulfill all of the dreams that Jamie still has (building the telescope). It is a sincere, complete love, which allows Landon to overcome his own selfishness even more (going to ask his father for help, who had abandoned the family when he was a child).

At the end of the movie, Landon realizes that Jamie gave him a much deeper vision of life, realer than what he could have imagined, and that Jamie obtained, in him, the miracle that she had desired to witness (min. 97).